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Talk:Seymour Stedman
Coalition? I wanted to check this using Search Inside, but it seems I can't do that for B&I any longer either on Amazon or on Google Books. I do very explicitly remember someone (I don't remember who) saying that, after the 1918 Congressional elections, the House had a greater number of Socialists and Republicans combined than it did Democrats. The phrasing was very clear that there was not a Socialist majority (there would be at other times) and also seemed pretty clear that the Democrats were still the largest party (otherwise it would have been more Socialists than Democrats, but fewer Socialists than Democrats and Republicans combined). From that I always assumed that meant the Republicans supported the Socialists in a coalition arrangement. It does occur to me that, if I'm remembering correctly, there are other possibilities. Stedman couldn't be a "minority speaker" with more Democrats than Socialists; the Republicans would have had to lend him some support to get him the gavel. Of course, that doesn't mean they were actually working side by side with the Socialists. They could have supported Stedman as Speaker but still considered themselves an opposition party. Of course, if they did, Stedman's position would be weak indeed, and he never seemed to want for confidence that he'd get his way on just about any vote. So what should we do? Continue referring to him as a coalition speaker, or quietly remove that word and hope no one notices the vagueness? Turtle Fan (talk) 00:57, May 22, 2017 (UTC) :On page 127, someone (can't tell who, search isn't available for that page) says that the Socialists and Republicans combined outnumber the Dems in Congress after the 1918 elections. Stedman's sole appearance explicitly refers to him as Speaker without qualification. The word "coalition" doesn't appear in a Google search, so we may have read too much into that. It may be that the Socialists had the slender majority. In any case, take out the qualifiers re coalitions. TR (talk) 01:36, May 22, 2017 (UTC) ::It's perplexing. "More Socialists and Republicans combined" suggests that the Socialists don't even have a plurality and the Democrats are still the largest party. It would take some wheeling and dealing to get a speaker from the second-largest party (at least in the US House; in other legislative bodies, where the speaker is merely the presiding officer and not a partisan role, no one would care much). There seems to be a real arrogance to the Socialists of that period, as if they've got the House sewn up nice and tight; but if they're only the second-largest party in a hung house, dependent on support on each and every vote from a third party that they once eclipsed and which now has the reputation of being something of a collection of oddballs, that's not warranted. ::At any rate, side-stepping seems wise. ML4E? Turtle Fan (talk) 22:05, May 22, 2017 (UTC) :::I agree on the sidestep. It does seem that there wasn't a formal coalition but that the Republicans supported the Socialist legislative agenda. It isn't unprecedented in Parliamentary democracies for a hung parliament to have a PM supported on a vote-by-vote basis without a formal coalition agreement. The first Steven Harper government Federally or the previous to the current Kathleen Wynne government here in Ontario. Normally, the party leader with the most seats short of a majority gets first crack at forming the government but but if s/he can't, it could be the leader with less seats. The deciding factor is whether they can get the majority of elected representatives to support them. ML4E (talk) 16:13, May 23, 2017 (UTC) ::::And of course, the US Congress isn't a parliament, so informal arrangements are even simpler. ::::It does seem like the Socialists were getting awfully big for their britches at that point in the story, if they weren't even the biggest party in the House, much less the majority party. Such swagger would only be justified by close cooperation with the Republicans indeed. But they were pursuing a pretty left-wing agenda. Since the left of the GOP migrated to the Socialists in the 80s, what remained and formed the rump party should have been pretty far from the Socialist platform. Of course, in the intervening years we saw the Democrats somehow steal the mantle of Remembrance from the Republicans, so they would have had to move again and seek out new ground somewhere else. Who knows where they might have wound up. And after almost forty years of uninterrupted Democratic rule, it's certainly possible that everyone who'd been left out in the cold would be excited enough at the prospect of putting that party on the run to cooperate, at least for one two-year session. ::::A shame we never really got a good look at the Republicans in the twentieth century. At some points in the story, they seem to be considered pathetic vestiges of the bad old days; at others, a regional power in the Upper Midwest that can be ignored elsewhere except when elections are extremely tight (sort of like the Bloc Quebecois, at least back in the day(; and at still others, a national party that's in a distant third place but is still both viable and respectable, like Britain's Liberal Democrats before the disastrous 2015 GE sent them into the wilderness. Turtle Fan (talk) 05:55, May 24, 2017 (UTC)